A multiple-input-multiple-output (MIMO) communication system employs multiple transmit antennas in a transmitter and multiple receive antennas in a receiver for data transmission. A MIMO channel formed by the transmit and receive antennas may be decomposed into independent channels, wherein each channel is a spatial sub-channel (or a transmission channel) of the MIMO channel and corresponds to a dimension. The MIMO system can provide improved performance (e.g., increased transmission capacity) if the additional dimensionalities created by the multiple transmit and receive antennas are utilized.
MIMO increases system link robustness and spectral efficiency. To optimize spectral efficiency for MIMO system, many efforts have been made, which can be broadly classified into two categorists: open-loop approaches and closed-loop approaches. The open-loop approaches include spatial multiplexing, space-time coding and the tradeoff therebetween them. The closed-loop approaches focus on maximizing the link capacity, which results in a “water-filling” solution, and on minimizing the weighted MMSE which provides an “inverse water-filling” solution.
In an open-loop MIMO system, the MIMO transmitter has no prior knowledge of the channel condition (i.e., channel state information). As such, space-time coding techniques are usually implemented in the transmitter to combat fading channels. In a closed-loop system, the channel state information (CSI) can be fed back to the transmitter from the receiver, wherein some pre-processing can be performed at the transmitter in order to separate the transmitted data streams at the receiver side.
Such techniques are referred to as beamforming techniques, which provide better performance in desired receiver's directions and suppress the transmit power in other directions. Beamforming techniques are considered for IEEE 802.11n (high throughput WLAN) standard. Closed-loop eigen-beamforming generally provides higher system capacity compared with the closed-loop solution, assuming the transmitter knows the down-link channel. Singular vector decomposition (SVD) based eigen-beamforming decomposes the correlated MIMO channel into multiple parallel pipes.
When applying the closed-loop approach to MIMO-OFDM (orthogonal frequency division multiplexing), the optimal solution requires a bit loading and power loading per OFDM subcarrier. In order to simplify the complexity, commonly assigned patent applications Ser. No. 11/110,346, filed Apr. 19, 2005, entitled “Power Loading Method and Apparatus for Throughput Enhancement in MIMO systems,” and patent application Ser. No. 11/110,337, filed Apr. 19, 2005, entitled “A Method and Apparatus for Quantization and Detection of Power Loadings in MIMO Beamforming System,” incorporated herein by reference, provide adapting coding/modulation and power level across all subcarriers, fixing coding/modulation for all data streams and only adjusting the uneven power level for all OFDM symbols. In such methods, the receiver needs to know the power loadings before decoding the received signals. Therefore, the transmitter needs to acknowledge the receiver about the power loadings used at the transmitter, or the receiver needs to do automatic detection to estimate the power loading values based on the received reference signals.